Square and Squarespace may sound the same, but are two very different companies in the e-commerce space, enabling individuals and businesses to build a website, sell their products online, and process payments.
An easy way to differentiate them is to think of Squarespace as a place to build websites and Square to process payments both online and offline.
Squarespace offers a very robust website builder with a lot of easy-to-use templates. You can create your personal website, blog, or ecommerce site. It is a great general-purpose website builder and can be used for a variety of use cases.
Square is a payment processor at its core with lots of additional functionalities such as POS systems, website builder, payroll services, and employee management. Square integrates with popular ecommerce tools like WooCommerce and Wix to process payments through them.
Who is Square for?
Square is the best choice for brick and mortar shops to expand their store sales with an online store. It’s also a great choice for anyone who wants to start an ecommerce business, as it offers everything you need to get started, including a payment processor, website builder, and ecommerce tools.
Who is Squarespace for?
Squarespace is the perfect choice for small businesses building an online store, bloggers, and personal websites with control over their own brand and design. The platform is also great for artists and creative professionals who want to showcase their work online.
Squarespace is easy to use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge. It also provides users with everything they need to create a professional website, including templates, hosting, 24/7 support, and eCommerce tools.
Square vs Squarespace Comparison
In this table, we compare the main features and functionalities Square and Squarespace offer.
Comparing their features can help you come up with a decision but it is important to also check both websites for the details. Sometimes these little things make all the difference in running your business smoothly!
| Square Features | Squarespace Features | |
| Ease of Use | ✔ | ✔ |
| Payment Processing (Built-In) | ✔ | ❌ |
| Other Payments Processors | SquareApple PayGoogle Pay | StripePayPalApple PayAfterpay (only available in the US, Australia, and New Zealand) |
| Point of Sale (POS) System | ✔(iOS, Android & hardware) | ✔(iOS app only) |
| Website Builder | ✔ | ✔ |
| Ecommerce Management | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shopping Cart | ✔ | ✔ |
| Mobile App ( with PoOS) | ✔ | ✔ |
| Support | Email Support | Live TextMonday to Friday6 am to 6 pm EST |
| Website Templates | ✔ | ✔ |
| Email Marketing | ✔ | ✔ |
| Additional Functionalities | Invoices, Payrolls, POS, Loyalty, Afterservice, Employee/Team Management | SEO tools, Pop-ups & banners, Donations, Subscriptions, Video Studio App. |
Squarespace’s Pros & Cons
Squarespace is a website builder that allows you to connect your custom domain, add an online shop, and checkout system. It comes with ready-to-use templates to build your Squarespace website without the need for any web developers.
However, it only offers more basic commerce features and might be considered a beginners’ service, and many of the features you need to run an online shop are locked into higher plans.
Pros
- Free trial (14-days)
- Easy to use
- Drag and drop website building (no-code)
- Beautiful website templates
- Very customizable
- Community (Forum & Facebook Group)
- Built-in email marketing functionality
- Integrates with marketing tools
Cons
- Basic Inventory Management
- Requires a payment processor like Stripe or Paypal to sell products
- Lacks advanced ecommerce features
- Can expensive compared to other website builders
- Important ecommerce features are not included in the Personal & Business plans
- Transaction fee at 3% on top of payment gateway up to the Business Plan
Square’s Pros & Cons
On the other side of the ring, Square offers more advanced commerce features such as a POS (physical card reader), and can be connected with multiple systems, meaning, you can keep your WordPress + WooCommerce website and won’t need to migrate just for the ecommerce features.
Here is an example of how Square’s website editor looks like when editing an ecommerce website.
Square’s biggest advantage is that it’s free to start and your only cost will be the transaction fees, and this comes with basic functionalities like invoices, POS, and the online store are free, but, adding functionalities like email marketing, text messaging, etc can quickly add up on the costs.
Pros
- Free plan to start an ecommerce business
- Competitive transaction fees rates
- Hardware solutions for payments: Register, card reader, magstripe and more
- Fraud Prevention
- Live chat support
Cons
- Only has annual plans
- Addons can add to costs
- Account stability & freezes in some cases
- Not suitable for high-volume transactions*
- Does not include phone support
*Bigger businesses with high volumes of sales might be better off negotiating their fees with Square or finding a more suitable payment processor that can support high volumes at better prices.
Ecommerce Features
Square is built primarily for brick and mortar stores, but does have all the essential features for an ecommerce business or store. You can accept payments online, create payments links for special orders, or just add it as a payment method on your website.
But, what makes the difference is Square’s advancedinventory management features.
On the other hand, Squarespace commercec is focused solely on digital businesses and as such offers more powerful tools for online sales, but less for brick and mortar stores. With Squarespace, you can sell both products & services, subscriptions, digital content and more.
It also comes with the connect marketing & sales features to grow your digital business like syncing with Instagram and Facebook, build and manage mailing lists, and an abandoned cart functionality!
The winner here is Squarespace, but if you don’t need all those features, Square is a better choice for a physical store.
Squarespace Vs Square: Pricing Comparison
As both products are different, it makes sense that their pricing differs. Here, we will compare the different pricing plans and which payment option works best for your ecommerce store.
Squarespace Pricing
Squarespace offers a 14-day free trial to test the platform and build your website using their template. It’s enough time to learn from their tutorials and learn to use Squarespace before you choose a paid plan.
Paid plans start from $23 and go up to $65 per month. Yearly plans come with a 25%-30% discount over the monthly price. What are the differences?
Personal Plan: $23/mo or $192/yo
This plan is suitable if you are only looking for a personal website (your online presence), blog, or portfolio site. It does come with 24/7 support and basic features like SSL Security and connecting your domain name.
Business Plan – $33/mo or $276/yo
Upgrading to the business level, allows for a bit more advanced tools and unlocks the first level of e-commerce tools, but comes with a 3% transaction fees, which is on top of the payment processor fees.
Basic Commerce Plan – $36/mo or $324/yo
Basic commerce removes Squarespace’s fees, but you still need to pay the payment processing. On this level, you also unlock the POS app, reviews, and more features that will help you as you grow your online store.
Advanced Commerce Plan – $65/mo or $588/yo
This is the highest public plan on Squarespace and offers more advanced solutions for e-commerce stores like abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and other sales tools like shopping calculators and complex discounts.
Squarespace Enterprise
For bigger customers with high-volumes of sales and multiple online stores, Squarespace has an enterprise solution. This seems to be a custom plan based on the customer’s needs and comes with a dedicated account manager, SSO, and a few white glove services.
Square Pricing
Starting a Square online store will cost you nothing, with a free plan, you can start immediately. Let’s see the different plans, processing rates, and features for each:
Free plan – $0/mo with 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee
The free plan is all you need to start selling products online or offline. It offers free website hosting and you can use it to sell on Instagram & Facebook or get a POS for your physical store.
Professional plan – $12/mo with 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee
The professional plan allows you to connect a custom domain and customize your website by adding your own fonts, removing Square ads, and adding password protected pages.
Performance plan – $26/mo with 2.9% + 30¢ processing fee
Bigger stores need some more advanced features, and here is where performance makes a difference. You can upgrade to add PayPal as a checkout option, abandoned cart recovery, gifting options, reviews, and eCommerce statistics.
Premium plan – $72/mo with 2.6% + 30¢ processing fee
High volumes of sales require a premium plan. The most important change here is Square dropping its processing fee rates from 2.9% to 2.6% and adding real-time shipping calculations.
Square offers only yearly plans
While Square is a much cheaper option over Squarespace, it requires you to pay annually and does not have a monthly option. This might be a problem for new online businesses, but the low fees make it suitable for bigger ones as well as brick-and-mortar shops.
Squarespace: A General Purpose Website Builder
Overall, Squarespace is a great option with a better site builder and templates to represent your brand, and it’s easier to start with. It comes with all the website building tools, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), HTML & CSS editing, and backend management you will need for your online business.
If you don’t need the ecommerce features, Squarespace is the right choice for you. Building your own website, blog, and online presence will be a breeze with it.
But, if you are planning to sell products, you need to weigh the pros and cons before you choose whether it works for you. There are better solutions for online stores than Squarespace.
Especially for established businesses that don’t need a website, it will not be the right fit.
How to Start
You can start with Squarespace with a 14-day trial by choosing the right template for you.
Alternatives to Squarespace
There are many solutions to building an ecommerce website or even a simple website. If Square is not the right alternative to Squarespace you were looking, here are a few better options for you to build your ecommerce website:
- Wix (General Purpose)
- WordPress (General Purpose)
- WordPress + WooCommerce (Ecommerce)
- Shopify (Ecommerce)
Square: A Powerful Payment Processor
Square is the perfect companion for retail businesses, restaurants, and other shops going online. If what you are looking for is a payment processor to handle payments offline and add an online store, then you are in the right place.
With Square Online (formerly Weebly), it becomes an all-in-one solution for payments, product management, and website building.
It also comes with credit card readers for all kinds of needs. It’s the perfect business companion for SMEs.
How to Start
Square offers a free plan to start, and only charges the payment processing. Upgrading to a paid plan, you need to commit to yearly payments, so, test the free plan first before you decide to commit:
Square’s Additional Services
It would be unfair to compare Square with Squarespace just on the website features. Square is foremost a payment processor and comes with additional features to manage a small business:
- Payment Processing
- Payroll
- POS
- Employee Benefits
And, many more you can find here.
Alternatives of Square
PayPal Zettle (Payment Processing with POS)
Vend by Lightspeed (Payment Processing with POS)
BigCommerce Essentials (Offline & Online Stores)
Shopify with the POS app (Both)
Which One to Choose?
If it was not clear up to now, I would sum it up like this:
Are you a store looking for a POS and adding an online store? Go with Square.
Are you looking to easily build a website and maybe add some products to sell? Go with Squarespace.
FAQs
What’s the difference between Square and Squarespace?
Both Square and Squarespace offer the tools to create a website and sell digital or physical products. The difference is that Square is also a payment processor, allowing a business to accept payments, have a physical Point of Sale system (card reader), and includes more services like Payroll and team management.
On the other hand, Squarespace focuses more on website building and ecommerce comes as a secondary feature. To sell products on Squarespace, you will need to connect another payment processor such as Stripe or PayPal.
Is Square owned by Squarespace?
No, the two companies are not affiliated in any way and are actively competing in the market.
Is Squarespace related to SquareUp?
No, the two companies are not affiliated in any way and are actively competing in the market.
How to cancel Squarespace?
- Go to the Home menu and click Settings.
- Go to Billing.
- Under Subscriptions, click your site’s subscription.
- Click Cancel subscription.
- Complete the cancellation form and any other questions you see.
- Choose Cancel subscription.
How to cancel Square?
- Go to Square’s Dashboard,
- Go to Account & Settings.
- From the Personal Information tab, select Deactivate Account.
- Choose one of the reasons for deactivation and click Continue.
- Enter the verification code to approve the deactivation.
- Proceed with the deactivation by selecting Deactivate.
*If you have a Square Online subscription as well, you need to cancel that separately.
**You can keep, sell, recycle, or use the Square Hardware with another vendor. They are not locked to Square’s platform.
Does Square support third-party integrations?
Square can be integrated with much third-party software like WooCommerce, Wix, LinkTree, GoDaddy, and more. Visit the Square App Marketplace to see all the integrations.
How long does it take Square to transfer money to my account?
Square transfers the payments in two business days, but can be expedited to an immediate transfer with an extra fee of 1.5%.
I am Nick, a B2B & SaaS marketer with a focus on SEO, content, and techstack marketing
I created the Marketing Experts Hub to simply explain marketing, cover business topics, and software for marketers with a pinch of opinion.
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